Feel, Memory Noel T. Jones
Your hand is safe inside your Abuela’s from the Staten Island Ferry, the impossibly long subway ride, through barking dogs, rabid people, percussive dominos, plumes of chicken grease flying from East Harlem windows, until you sit with Nani at her kitchen table. The two women make sense of bouncing tongues with English words peppered in like adobo. You laugh when Abuela punctuates the end of a sentence with “Ma” in her New York accent. How can someone as old as Nani still be someone’s Ma? Don’t women become grandmas at a certain age? Nani plies you with cold boxes of apple juice and packs of saltines leftover from soup deliveries, and fawns over you in a Spanish you can’t understand. Incantations for good hair and a quick wit and a handsome smile, a good job and for kindness. Nani’s apartment is an island, like Puerto Rico, like Manhattan, like Staten Island. Abuela only ever relaxes at this kitchen table cluttered with a stained colador and a boveda of veladoras for Saint Jude. Nani gives you all the crunchy rice from the bottom of a pot that magically refills after each meal. Abuela has her pension from her city job, so the part-time work she takes altering clothes or cleaning homes or other forms of domestic labor are for soccer cleats, swimming lessons, or a tricycle for you. Nani’s kitchen has frying pan that is always like the Fourth of July, firecrackers of oil splattering, and jibaro and bomba music bounding from her radio with a compensatory vivacity she no longer possesses, and so you dance for her. Nani claps in time. “Baila, baila cómo el pingüino.”
Abuela and Nani say words like papa, mama, no, telefono, ningun until you sit at Nani’s feet like a cat and she scratches your scalp. Your unwed mother left you at the hospital not long after your birth and no one’s seen her since. Abuela and Nani raise the boy they both always wanted but never had. Your father, who’s Irish and also from an island, sends birthday cards until he doesn’t. Abuela and Nani preen over you your whole life. Titis come out of the woodwork and wrap you in clothes that make you look nice, but never cool. They’ll buy you books and puzzles and globes and tell you things about an education and keys. They’ll stop speaking Spanish around you and stop playing the magical music around you. They’ll tell you to pronounce your name with fewer syllables. With a subtle, strangulating move, under the guise of good intentions, they’ll suggest you spend time with kids from other neighborhoods, and that maybe cross country is better than soccer or basketball. There’ll be fists that have the word faggot packed behind them that will find your ribs. When you see the kids you used to know when you’re no longer kids they’ll call you maricone, and you’ll retreat to your books and will stick out on the construction sites where you work for a living and try to make yourself more of a man. Girls will ask you if you’re sure you want to go through with this, and you’ll nod and shake and sweat and they’ll try to coach and coax you when you can’t keep it up. They’ll giggle when you try to speak Spanish, but their laughter is kind and you learn to find refuge where you were socially taught to only visit with possessive violence.
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